Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalGay Santa ad a surprise hit in modern Norway
Christmas ads have become an annual tradition, often appearing as mini-films with their own festive story. But one Norwegian commercial, featuring Father Christmas kissing a man waiting for him at home on Christmas Eve, has become a surprise hit.
In When Harry meets Santa, the four-minute ad by Norway's state-run Posten postal service, the man is seen writing Father Christmas a letter to the North Pole with the message: "All I want for Christmas is you." And he gets his wish.
"We wanted to celebrate the 50-year anniversary since the abolition of a law prohibiting same-sex relationships," says Monica Solberg, Posten's marketing director. The ad has been watched well over two million times online.
"The magnitude of response took us a bit by surprise. We expected a reaction, but not to such an extent."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59738542
14-year-old in dressing room killed by LAPD who were shooting at assault suspect
Los Angeles police fatally shot a 14-year-old girl who was in a clothing store dressing room Thursday when officers fired on an assault suspect and a bullet went through the wall and struck the girl, authorities said.
Police also fatally shot the suspect Thursday morning at a Burlington store in the North Hollywood area of the San Fernando Valley, police said.
Witnesses told KCBS-TV that a man began acting erratically, threatening to throw items from the upper floor, and attacked a woman with a bicycle lock shortly before noon as the store was crowded with holiday shoppers.
Officers answered a report of an assault and others of shots being fired, police said. Investigators have not found a gun at the scene.
https://www.wbir.com/article/news/nation-world/police-kill-teen-girl-in-clothing-store-shooting-at-suspect/507-cf62c8e1-71d4-4e5f-bc57-48e38c8c0f3e
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Suspect apparently didn't have a gun, yet police happily fired away in a crowded store......
She's escaped death while chasing storms, but 'lost most everybody' after coming out
As the eye of Hurricane Laura passed over Lake Charles, Louisiana, in the early morning of Aug. 27, 2020, storm chaser Chimera Comstock took advantage of the brief calm to post a photo of herself on Twitter — rain-soaked and grinning as she held up a blue, pink and white transgender Pride flag in a hotel parking lot.
“Since I have all your attention right now in the #eye cat 4 of #HurricaneLaura I thought I would take this moment to #ComeOut as #trans to the world,” Comstock wrote in the tweet, which she has given NBC News permission to embed, even though it includes her former name. “I started HRT on Feb 17th 2020. Anyways back to surviving this #storm. See you all on the otherside! #transrightsarehumanrights!”
For Comstock, who grew up in Oklahoma, coming out felt like throwing off a mask she had worn since childhood.
“I wasn’t happy no matter where I was, just because it wasn’t me that was ever having the success,” Comstock said, noting that she is part of the “zero meter club,” the unofficial name given to a small group of seasoned storm chasers who have gotten as close as possible to a tornado without dying. “It wasn’t me that people were seeing or knew or became friends with — it was a character I played to hide the fact that I was trans.”
Rumors about her transition were already swirling within the storm chaser community, a small group of mostly men from conservative parts of the country, Comstock said. She also noted that there are not many openly gay storm chasers — and even fewer who are openly transgender.
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/trans-storm-chaser-escaped-deadly-tornadoes-lost-everybody-coming-rcna9647
Conservative parents push for book bans - and unintentionally make reading cool again
Moms and dads stormed into the Spotsylvania County town hall, in Virginia, in early November, hell-bent on purging all “objectionable” books from in the scholastic jurisdiction. Novels containing any commentary about race, sexuality and sexual content was put under the microscope, as a fresh reactionary panic takes aim at the stacks in high school libraries. “Results for gay, 172. Results for heterosexual, two,” said Christina Burris, one of the attending parents, who used the district’s literature search function to make her point. The board relented, voting 6-0 to enact a liquidation.
One of the books targeted by name was 33 Snowfish, an acclaimed 2003 novel concerning a trio of runaway teens and all sorts of sordid, Kids-ish behavior. The concerned parents of northern Virginia believed that heady themes of poverty, addiction and abuse have no place in the sanctums of learning, and therefore, the book needed to go.
When Paul Cymrot heard about the meeting, he tracked down as many copies of 33 Snowfish as he could find. He soon discovered, ironically, that book was never really in the school library. 33 Snowfish is barely in print, and Cymrot tells me that it was an ebook version, lingering in some dusty corner of the school library servers, which sparked the initial animus.
The moral militancy immediately backfired, because Cymrot knows a good business opportunity when he sees one. He’s owned the Spotsylvania-area Riverby Books for 25 years, and possesses a shrewd nose for the ebbs and flows of the publishing market. One bookselling truth remains eternally undefeated, explains Cymrot. When a censorious zeitgeist swallows up a novel, a lot of people will want to buy it.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/dec/23/us-book-bans-conservative-parents-reading
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When my kids were growing up I left "questioned" books lying around in plain sight. Most of them got read. And discussed.
A brain circuit linking pain and breathing may offer a path to prevent opioid deaths
When people feel pain, they tend to breathe faster. When they take an opioid to ease that pain, their breathing slows. And if they overdose, respiration can stop entirely.
Now scientists have discovered a brain circuit in mice that appears to explain how opioids affect both pain and breathing, a team reports in the journal Neuron.
The team also found evidence that it's possible to separate these effects, potentially allowing for pain drugs that don't affect respiration.
If the finding holds up in people, "it's possible that we can develop safer analgesics," says Sung Han, the study's lead author and an assistant professor at the Salk Institute in San Diego.
That's a "really important goal" in a nation where opioid overdoses kill more than 100 people a day, says Dr. Kevin Yackle, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco who was not involved in the study.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/22/1066011236/a-brain-circuit-linking-pain-and-breathing-may-offer-a-path-to-prevent-opioid-de
Cops Covered Up Sex Trafficking Ring to Receive Free Sex Acts, Lawsuit Says
Top cops for a local department in Virginia actively hindered a sex trafficking investigation for almost four years in exchange for free sex acts from the victimized women, according to a recently updated federal lawsuit.
An unidentified woman, referred to as “Jane Doe” in the lawsuit, alleges that 13 officers at the Fairfax County Police Department, including a captain and the former chief, berated, threatened, and coerced a detective who began looking into the trafficking ring until he dropped the investigation altogether. During that time, Doe and other victims of the operation were forced to provide free services to some of the officers, according to the suit.
“Defendants knowingly solicited and obtained commercial sex services from Jane Doe, a victim of sex trafficking, when each defendant knew or should have known that Jane Doe was made to engage in commercial sex services by means of force, fraud or coercion,” the lawsuit says.
And when Fairfax County’s sex trafficking detective William Woolf found victims of the trafficking ring who said they knew cops were soliciting sex in exchange for protecting the enterprise, his captain allegedly did nothing to help.
“I’m a lifeguard and you are far offshore drowning, and I’m not going to try to save you,’” the captain told him, according to the lawsuit.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vbnx/fairfax-county-virginia-police-sex-trafficking-cover-up-lawasuit
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Cops are the largest organized gangs in the country
MAGA Politico Falls for Hoax on Biden 'Concentration Camps'
Some internet mischief-makers created a fake DHS website purporting to show President Biden’s plan for COVID-19 concentration camps—and conservative Senate candidate JD Vance fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
The venture capitalist and would-be politician perhaps should have noticed that the site—which claimed to outline government intentions to restrict cross-state travel and set up Australia-like “quarantine centers”—listed the DHS Secretary not as present officeholder Alejandro Mayorkas but as Tim Woods, otherwise known as the DHS secretary in two seasons of the TV show 24.
It’s just the latest example of how Vance’s “culture-war shoutouts, they’re not landing right,” notes Fever Dreams co-host Will Sommer. Rather, every time Vance spits out something inane (like telling voters they can dine with him and his buddy Peter Thiel if they donate $10,000 to his campaign), his rival Josh Mandel “brutally own[s]” him—by, for example, offering to meet voters for $10 in a Chick-fil-A parking lot.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/gullible-maga-fan-jd-vance-falls-for-obvious-hoax-about-bidens-covid-concentration-camps?ref=home
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J.D. really IS a dumb MAGAbilly!
Are These Dogs on Death Row for a Crime They Didn't Commit?
A shocking murder mystery is playing out in a small Maryland town, pulling in a former Republican state senator and a Hollywood true crime producer along the way. But many say the prime suspects—who are now awaiting their executions—have been wrongfully accused.
Nola Lowman’s beloved pet dogs will soon be euthanized, pending a last-ditch request for a judge to spare them, after she says local animal control officials improperly charged the pair with a cat-killing she believes was actually committed by a hungry coyote.
The execution order is based solely on the testimony of a lone eyewitness, the late feline’s owner, whose story changed significantly before he skipped town and abandoned his remaining cats without food or water, court documents allege.
Now, an intense court battle to spare Odin, 2, and Lucy, 6, who have never before been accused of any sort of violence, according to authorities, is entering its final stretch.
Since the two dogs were seized from their Millersville, Maryland home in early 2021 by animal control officials and placed in isolation on the county kill shelter’s “death row,” Odin and Lucy have not once been allowed outside for exercise or to relieve themselves, according to the attorney representing Lowman.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/are-odin-and-lucy-two-anne-arundel-county-maryland-dogs-dying-for-a-crime-they-didnt-commit?ref=home
Billionaire resigns from Mormon church, donates $600K to LGBTQ group
A billionaire – thought to be the richest man from Utah – announced he was donating $600,000 to a LGTBQ group and resigning from his Mormon church in a 900-word letter accusing the church of hindering the progress of civil rights and taking advantage of its members.
Jeff Green, CEO of Trade Desk, a software marketing company, sent the letter to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or commonly referred to as LDS, President Russell Nelson on Monday requesting the removal of his records, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
"I believe the Mormon church has hindered global progress in women's rights, civil rights and racial equality, and LGBTQ+ rights," Green wrote in the letter, according to the Tribune.
Green, who now resides in California, had been skeptical of Mormon practices for some time and drifted away from the church a decade ago, reports The Washington Post.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/12/22/utah-billionaire-leaves-lds-church/8993453002/
People Got Sick at a Conspiracy Conference. They're Sure It's Anthrax.
A group of unvaccinated people who attended a huge conspiracy conference in Dallas earlier this month all became sick in the days after the event with symptoms like coughing, shortness of breath, and fever. Instead of blaming the global COVID pandemic, however, the conspiracy theorists think they were attacked with anthrax.
This far-right conspiracy claim began after a dozen people spent time together in a confined space at the ReAwaken America tour event in Dallas over the weekend of Dec. 10. And the fact that this was likely a COVID outbreak and superspreader event has been almost entirely ignored.
The anthrax claim was first made by Joe Oltmann on his Conservative Daily podcast earlier this week. In a video recording of the podcast, Oltmann can be seen coughing and sneezing on camera, symptoms often associated with COVID-19 or other illnesses.
Instead, Oltmann, who has spent much of 2021 spreading bogus election conspiracies, claimed that he and his fellow conspiracy theorists who recently attended the conference had been attacked by anthrax. The conference, run by Tulsa businessman Clay Clark, was headlined by figures like disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump adviser Roger Stone, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. Eric Trump, the son of former President Donald Trump, also spoke at the event.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7wz5a/people-got-sick-at-a-conspiracy-conference-theyre-sure-its-anthrax
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